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Watsky

To end off the first major day of Warped Tour coverage for Music Remedy, we're going in another extreme direction by presenting our interview with rapper Watsky. Watsky as well as being a rapper is a well known poet and was even part of Def Poetry Jam on HBO. He opened the doors to a day of coverage that included electronic pop act Captain Capa to rapper K. Flay to deejay Crizzly. He has great tours coming up and is playing Outside Lands festival in August with his new new full length coming out August 12th! Read on for our new interview!

Maybe the three things you feel you must have while on Warped Tour?Underwear, shirts, deodorant!

Then I know this tour is a little bit different where you have a whole stage where it's just a mix of rappers, electronic and dance acts. How do you think that's helped your stage (Beatport) as a group? You're all together, not spread out.I'm really, really glad to be on the Beatport stage. I think that what's cool about it is that, first of all, I've made friends with all the other acts on it. So we have a good camaraderie. Everyone gets along. Not just as people but artists ourselves. We all hang out and get to know each other. So that's cool because we actually have like a group of friends now. Also just the fact that we're on a small stage means that people who come see us actually have to want to be there. Because if you're on a main stage or on the amphitheater, you're going to be playing to a lot of people who don't actually like your music. We're playing to people who are really enthusiastic about what we do and I would rather be doing that then being in the amphitheater where there's a second stage set up next to it. You see a bunch of bored people who are just waiting for the next band setting up across from you. So we have big booming sound. A great sound system and crew. We have eclectic acts so people who go to the Beatport stage are looking to broaden their horizons and what they're interested in musically.

Then you've been doing this for a while. I know you've played Boston before on tours but how did you first get started? Like when did you know this is what you wanted to do?My first professional credit was on this old tv show called Def Poetry Jam on HBO so I did spoken word poetry before I was a rapper. I did poetry slams and competitions and open mics when I was growing up in San Francisco as a teenager. I was just doing that and steadily getting better and then I got that credit on that tv show and that allowed me to kind of start doing college gigging. So for five years, I did what's called a NACA circuit which are conferences that allow you to just pinball around the country playing to different colleges and small shows for people who don't really have name recognition but can put on good hour long shows. I spent a long time just kind of riding it out playing hundreds of college gigs til I was finally able to get the traction to start to play headlining shows for my fans. For the past two and a half years, I've kind of gained a following through the internet which has allowed us to do the live touring thing.

And how is it going over? Have the shows been really good?It's been killer crowds. Like every where we go, we've been drawing really well. I didn't know if my fans would show up to Warped Tour or if the Warped Tour fans would like my stuff. Any doubts that I've had were proven wrong with in the first two shows. Like in every single place. Like in Scranton? I didn't know I had any fans in Scranton. It's like hundreds of people every time. They know the words and then some people will come up afterwards and say that they had never heard of us until Warped Tour. That's what we wanted. We wanted to play to a mix of people that had been initiated already and then to get us the chance to win over some new people.

Then what is coming up? You're about halfway through the Warped Tour now, maybe music, new tours?Yeah I have an album coming out August 12th called "All You Can Do" and two days before that, I'm playing a big festival in San Francisco called Outsidelands which will be huge. It's in my hometown. it's a really great festival so that will set up the album release. Then we're going to go into rehearsals for tour. So September, we're in Europe. October, November we're circling the country again for our own dates and then December we'll be in Australia. Then 2015 we're going to figure it out from there but we got a lot planned out so we're hoping for the best!